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| “ | Don't lose your head, Detective. You're having enough trouble finding one. | „ |
| ~ Harry taunting Detective Elliot Stabler. |
Harry Baker is the secondary antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Prodigy". He is a brilliant, but sociopathic, teenager who tortures and kills animals, and is briefly suspected of killing a police officer.
He is portrayed by Michael Pitt, who also portrayed Mason Verger in Hannibal, Paul in the remake of Funny Games, Jimmy Darmody in Boardwalk Empire, and Justin Pendleton in Murder By Numbers.
Biography[]
Harry was born to an unknown father and a promiscuous mother who works as a stripper and used drugs while she was pregnant with him; Harry was born with a positive toxicology screen for cocaine. He also grew up hearing his mother have anonymous sex with multiple men.
By adolescence, Harry had evolved into a sadistic sociopath who enjoyed inflicting pain, and tortured and killed several neighborhood pets. He was also fascinated by serial killers, reading everything he could get his hands on about true crime and forensic procedure. When a girl at his high school rejected his advances, Harry retaliated by killing her dog and leaving the animal's severed head on her doorstep. Despite his antisocial behavior, however, he was intellectually brilliant, and put in his high school's gifted program.
He was finally arrested for lighting a cat on fire, and sentenced to community service with NYPD Animal Abuse officer Pam Tilden.
"Prodigy"[]
When Tilden is raped, murdered, and dismembered, Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit investigate the animal abuse offenders she arrested, and come to suspect Harry after witnessing his cold, morbid interest in her death. They bring him in for questioning, and bait him by asking him to create a hypothetical profile of Tilden's killer. Harry takes ghoulish pleasure in speculating about what the killer did to Tilden and why, horrifying even his own mother. He says that the killer used a rock as a weapon, a detail that only the killer would know. Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cabot orders Harry arrested, but he is released after the detectives discover that Tilden's coworker Joe Poletti, a convicted rapist, committed the crime.
Stabler sees Harry at Poletti's arraignment on obscenity charges, which Cabot is using to buy the detectives time to connect him to Tilden. Harry, ostensibly doing his homework, mocks Stabler for failing to find Poletti's cache of souvenirs from the murder, remarking that serial killers always keep more than one. Stabler warns Harry that he will be watching his every move, but later realizes that Harry was right, as he had not looked in all the potential hiding places Poletti could have stashed souvenirs.
Stabler goes back to the crime scene and investigates a "lover's lane" area a few hundred feet away, and finds one of Tilden's earrings, proving that Poletti committed the murder and helping Stabler put him in prison for 25 years.
External links[]
- Harry Baker at the Law & Order Wiki
